


Is Caring an Advantage?

by notagarroter (redbuttonhole)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 20:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11044134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbuttonhole/pseuds/notagarroter
Summary: An inquiry into the role of empathy and love on BBC Sherlock.





	Is Caring an Advantage?

There's a popular reading of BBC Sherlock that goes, "At the show’s beginning, Sherlock is a cold-hearted genius, but thanks to John/various other characters, Sherlock is gradually becoming humanized, and that will eventually make him a better detective and a great man."

I think that's a valid reading, and certainly a seductive one for many people.  After all, this interpretation flatters most viewers – we may never be deductive geniuses, but at least we understand love and emotion and empathy!  And that makes us, in our way, better than Sherlock. Right?  This is reassuring.

But as character arcs go, it's also very traditional, to the point of perhaps being a cliche.  I think, with a slight shift in perspective, there is another way to read the show – and that is as a serious philosophical engagement with Mycroft's assertion:

  


This is a hard possibility to even consider for most of us, as we've been so engrained with the idea that caring, love, and empathy are vital to morality.  A person without these qualities cannot possibly fit our common definition of "good".  But there are arguments to the contrary, it turns out.   

* * *

A philosopher named Paul Bloom, for example, has published a book and a number of articles questioning whether empathy is actually good for humanity.  According to him,

> Certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data...  ([x](https://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy))

I don't know if Sherlock is familiar with Bloom’s work, but he lays out much the same argument in TGG:  

  


and later:

> JOHN: There are lives at stake, Sherlock – actual _human_ lives… Just - just so I know, do you care about that at all?  
>  SHERLOCK _(irritably)_ : Will caring about them help save them?  
>  JOHN: Nope.  
>  SHERLOCK: Then I’ll continue not to make that mistake.

and:

> Oh, you’re angry with me, so you won’t help.  Not much cop, this caring lark. 

Taken seriously, Sherlock's arguments are sound. Both within the context of the show and outside it, he's not wrong: John really does put people needlessly at risk because he's angry with Sherlock.  He wastes time worrying about one kidnap victim when he could using his medical skills to save dozens of people close by.  And even John recognizes that caring about people will not help save them.

The show expresses an at best ambivalent attitude toward love and sentiment on a number of occasions:  

  


 

  


 

  


Most viewers tend to take these statements as examples of Sherlock's emotional immaturity.  Once John and his other friends have taught him how to feel, Sherlock will recognize that he was wrong about all this.

But I think we owe it to the show to take Sherlock's ideas here seriously.  The show tells us that love can certainly be a strength – as when Molly helped Sherlock with his Reichenbach plan, and when Mrs Hudson hid evidence for him in ASiB – but it can also be a terrible weakness.  

In S1, Sherlock actually makes fewer mistakes because he is more removed.  Consider [the example of Jennifer Wilson](http://notagarroter.tumblr.com/post/122140545460/i-dont-want-to-derail-someones-cute), where John, Lestrade, and Anderson are all guided by sentiment and compassion when guessing her motivation for scratching out the name "Rachel" on the floor.  Only Sherlock, guided by dispassionate logic and rationality, correctly deduces that Wilson is giving them a password that will guide them to the killer.

Similarly in TGG, Sherlock is better able than John to focus on the cases and not get distracted by the hostages strapped in Semtex. Sherlock knows the hostages will be best served by him solving the cases, so he doesn't waste time worrying about them.  

The first inkling that this approach will no longer work comes at the end of TGG, when Moriarty threatens to "burn the heart out of him."  Sherlock maintains that he doesn't have one, but Moriarty has already seen that that's not true anymore—because this time the Semtex-clad hostage is someone he actually cares about, and that makes him vulnerable.

  


From then on, BBC Sherlock becomes, arguably, not a story about Sherlock becoming a better man and better detective thanks to love and compassion – but rather a catalog of the failures that result from this change in his emotional perspective.  

Take, for example, Irene in ASiB.  Logically, Sherlock has every good reason to mistrust her motives and treat her as an enemy.  But as Mycroft points out, he allows himself to be blinded by a sentimental attachment to her:

  


Then in TRF, Moriarty is able to force Sherlock's hand by threatening his three closest friends.  

  


And in Series 3, Sherlock is so taken with Mary Morstan that he ignores telling clues to her identity until he finds himself at the wrong end of her gun.  

  


Even in HLV, however, Sherlock has not gone completely soft, nor given himself over to sentiment entirely.  We see from his "relationship" with Janine that he still has the ability to act with remove, and he retains a certain suspicion of tender emotions:

  


Hollywood loves to tell us that "love conquers all" and that cold, dispassionate geniuses need to develop empathy and compassion to become fully human and "good".  But BBC Sherlock resists such cliches as often as it indulges in them, and this story isn't so simple.  I do think this is, at least from some angles, a love story – but it's a story in which love is at least as much a weakness as a strength.  

As Mycroft tells us back in ASiP of John Watson, 

  


To truly understand this show and its philosophical investments, we need to take that second possibility seriously.  

thanks to @callie-ariane for her transcripts.  


**Author's Note:**

> This was written before S4. I think you could argue that the point I'm making here has been completely contradicted by S4... Certainly, in interviews and such, the creators have gone full-force in embracing the cliche that "love conquers all". 
> 
> I don't know, though. I think I could still make an argument that even S4 is doing something a bit more complicated with the idea of love and caring. 
> 
> And maybe it's worth deconstructing that cliche at some point. If we're talking about love, why use such a war-like metaphor? Is love really about "conquering"? And if so, what does that tell us?


End file.
